101. Stuff

A story of a scheduled private stream

Ages ago it was decided we need security settings for our streams. But there always were more important things to do. The day has finally come — we need to add these settings.

Birthday Morning

I woke up on my birthday and got message from Petro: ‘MAN! We need schedule and security settings for LIVE4 GoPro app for iOS. Oh, really, by the way, happy birthday!’.

After a brief discussion I understood that we need to give user the option to schedule further streams without starting any. Also while streaming the user has to have the option to changle the visibility of the stream. Anything may happen, you know, not everyone is ready for accidents pantsu shots.

Security

The problem with on-the-fly stream settings while streaming is that I always strive for then simplicity with only one functional button, while there are some buttons and controllers to add every time. As you may remember, now there are two buttons, one of which is Stop while another is Share. Bottom one is more functional, depicting the state.

But that doesn’t matter now, just reminding to show that zen is there and no need to ruin the harmony. After trying a set of different variations and adding buttons (Petro shared his currently working alpha versions of privacy functionality) I was enlightenment finally wrapped me up. Privacy mode is just one of the characteristics of the current stream. The only difference from Battery, Filmed, Uploaded and Left is that Privacy mode can be changed.

That’s it! Adding the Privacy mode to the status icons beneath preview while streaming. Tapping on this highlighted and pretty obvious click-me icon with caption should show the menu allowing to choose one of the privacy mode.

As I understood while hearing from Petro, they’ll remain the same as I offered earlier:

• Public — anyone can see the stream
• Not listed — only those, who have the link, can see the stream
• Private — only the one, who created the stream, can see it

In future we’ll need to add functionality not just to share or delete own streams (streamed already and shown in My Videos, see photo on top) but also to edit their Privacy mode.

Scheduling

We thought on that for years. User should have the ability to schedule his or her stream to start automatically. The scenarios are pretty clear to describe. Here’s how it looked like in the first ever prototype of future-future version of LIVE4 GoPro for iOS (we had only start-stop stream functionality back then):

As you now, the future-future has almost come so it’s time to add at least date/time scheduling feature. I am not yet sure where to put it, as I want to preserve zen aesthetics of the app look and feel.

So far I used the same button that is used on Streaming LIVE state for sharing, but I think we need a better solution. It draws too much attention shading big huge Start LIVE stream button that doesn’t look so cool now. May be we need more captions or something.

Tapping that button should show the Schedule stream dialog similar to what has been done before. There is a lot to improve! Yay!

Leaving to celebrate my birthday!
Cheers!